How Music Travels

http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html

This is an animated flow chart that shows how music travels around the world by genre made by the British Travel service, Thomson. It is is neat to watch and clearly shows the relationships and trends of how music spreads in popularity around the world. You can watch the whole timeline- starting at 1800-2000, or click on a decade. The spacing of the timeline is a bit confusing- there is the same amount of space for a century and a decade. I also think it would be cool, if you could isolate by genre- I thought the colored buttons on the bottom did this but the do not do anything…Still a neat tool to use if you want to learn a bit about the evolution of music.

MSNBC Hurricane Tracker

This was made by Stamen for MSNBC weather, much like the NYTimes hurricane tracker. This interactive map shows the path of the hurricane and allows you to zoom in on a specific point to get information about the wind and direction. There is a 3 color code for current, previous and forecast conditions, along with an animation showing how the storm is traveling. You can get a lot of information about the current location of the storm, but it is a bit confusing to navigate through. There is a lot of information available in layers and the first layer give a good summary of what is going on. It might be better to sift through some of the information and either merge or get rid of some layers at it can be a bit overwhelming to be bombarded with so much information. There is a also a neat historical storm map showing paths of past storms.

Planetary cycles from 10th century

This is a very interesting graph of the planets. It clearly shows different patterns of travel throughout time, but the shape of the orbits is unclear. There is no real evidence of how the orbits behaved, except for in relation to one another. The orbits appear to be wave functions with different amplitudes. They could be interpreted to interfere with each other, or be parallel to each other. Considering what was known about the planets at this time, I think this is a pretty nice picture of what the trajectories may have been. Knowing everything we know, or rather I know about planets now, it is hard to not want to relate the lines to this information. It would be interesting to see an updated version of it based on the facts we have discovered since it was made.